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| Scribner |
by Jeannette Walls
4 Stars
When
their mom goes AWAL to pursue her singing career, Bean and her older sister,
Liz, decide to visit their Uncle Tinsley in the town where their mother grew up.
The two hop a bus from California, travel across the country, and end up at the
Holiday mansion in Byler, Virginia where they beg lodgings from the eccentric
Uncle Tinsley. Byler is a wonderful change for the two girls, at least at
first, offering a stability they have never known, and a sense of family roots.
But Byler also offers adversity through prejudice, preconceived notions and
abuse of power. How much can these two girls endure before they take to the
road again?
While
this novel is not promoted as a YA novel, it has great YA appeal. First off, the
narrator is twelve-year-old, Bean, whose voice lends a great youthful flavor to
the novel, and whose simplistic views of right and wrong and naiveté enriches
the thematic elements, and amplifies the shortcomings of those adults who ought
to know better. The novel has the flavor
of To Kill a Mockingbird, especially
the town of Byler, a setting reminiscent
of Maycomb, Alabama. In Byler, manners and family tradition are important, segregation
is part of the history of the area and desegregation of schools has just begun,
and the past is never forgotten. In fact, To Kill a Mockingbird is mentioned a
few times in the novel, since Bean is reading it in school, and perhaps that is
in part the inspiration for the plot of this story. The story is set against
the backdrop of the Vietnam War, and while the war is mentioned a few times
briefly, it doesn’t actually play a large part in the narrative—just as WWII is
mentioned a few times in passing during the Mockingbird
narrative. As in Mockingbird, the
antagonists in the novel are all adults, the first being Charlotte, Liz and Bean’s
mother, whose selfish antics leave the two girls in a constant state of neglect.
Thankfully, she only plays a small part in the entire work, and this is fortunate
because “flaky” just scratches the surface of her character. While Liz and Bean
are very forgiving of their mother for the most part, the reader may have a
more difficult time forgiving her. Perhaps the most evil and hated protagonist
in the story is Jerry Maddox, the mill foreman and boss, who constantly bends
the rules and abuses others simply because he can get away with it. When the
two girls join their fates to Jerry’s, they have no idea how much trouble they
will encounter. While I enjoyed the ending of the novel and the sort of poetic justice
that Maddox receives, I am troubled that the story does not offer consequences
for Maddox’s eventual fate. However, perhaps that is the way of the world—karma
steps in where men will not—the consequences of the universe are far more
serious than those of the court system. Adult readers who enjoyed Harper Lee’s
novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and
Kathryn Stockett’s The Help will
likely enjoy this work. Younger readers who enjoyed Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool, and Gary Schmidt’s Okay for Now will find a similar magic
in this work.
